Green Room review: A surprising, smartly written and viscerally violent siege film…
Green Room review
Don’t be dissuaded by the down and out punk rockers, the crazed white-supremacist skinheads lead by Captain Picard himself, or the gritty ‘Roadhouse of hardcore horror’ in bumfuck nowhere. Jeremy Saulnier’s latest feature Green Room is a surprising, smartly written and viscerally violent siege film that will have your adrenalin pumping from start to finish.
Set in the Oregonian backwoods, punk rockers The Ain’t Rights have been doing it tough on the road for too long: living hand to mouth, siphoning petrol from unsuspecting car owners and waking up in unknown places after falling asleep at the wheel. After the band – lead singer Tiger (Callum Turner), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat), bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) and drummer Reece (Jo Cole) – are decidedly led astray by an aspiring punk radio host Tad, he offers them a legitimate, paying gig as recompense at a remote neo-Nazi bar.
Taking up Tad’s offer, the band quickly realise on arrival that they are way out of their depth and plan a hasty retreat after their set. The film’s tension begins to rise with the band’s opening song; a rendition of The Dead Kennedy’s Nazi Punks F**k Off before rising once again when they happen upon the murder of a young woman in the Green Room. Driven by their inexperience and youthful impulses, the band’s predicament starts to spiral fatefully out of control. Along with the dead girl’s friend Amber (Imogen Poots), the group find themselves targeted by the bar’s owner Darcy (Patrick Stewart) and his posse of red-laced skinheads.
Green Room review
On the surface, Green Room’s premise, form and framing appear to be pretty simple, particularly given its confinement to within the four walls of the bar’s green room for much of the film, and yet it’s anything but. Production Designer Ryan Warren Smith and D.O.P. Sean Porter present audiences with a gritty and deceptively textured world that feels raw and slightly on edge. Saulnier’s discerning dark quips and deliciously brutal narrative garner universal gasps, laughs and sharp inhales from the audience at unsuspecting moments. So much so that it even had one critic momentarily leave the room.
But the violence when it occurs, is neither overdone nor lingering. Armed with knives, makeshift machetes, rifles or throat ripping pit bulls, death by skinhead or canine is shockingly blunt and fluid; moving towards its next predicament so that you can’t quite come down from your adrenalin high. Even the disturbingly entertaining, languidly paced third act shoot out manages to end the film on a decisive nod.
There’s raw and there’s rawr – and Saulnier’s Green Room will impress you with both – It’s terrific and violently entertaining.
Green Room review by Sacha Hall, October 2015.
Green Room opens in UK cinemas on 13th May 2016.
